WoW: Burning Crusade UK Final Beta Impressions

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Last look at Blizzard's expansion beta prior to next week's launch.

By Paul Reilly

It's been a long time since there was this much anticipation for an expansion pack. The venerable add-on disc used to be such a big deal in the land before broadband-time. Think about how excited people used to get about a few a more levels for Command & Conquer, or the wild speculation about how many tentacles a new baddie had sticking out of its face in the first Half-Life expansion. With semi-professional mod teams and bedroom level designers cheerfully birthing endless illegitimate free content children for any big PC game, commercial add-on packs have wilted. So in recent times, that once-proud silver platter of extra gaming hours has usually been a cynical offering designed to squeeze more money out of a game's fanbase rather than an attempt to fix fundamental shortcomings or experiment with new ideas. Hello-o, Sims expansion packs and that 8 hours of looking for power switches that was supposed to keep the four people who loved Doom 3 happy.

This add-on for the massively multiplayer fantasy roleplaying game World of Warcraft though&#Array; You'd be forgiven for thinking it was a whole new game. WoW is, let's be honest, the biggest game in the whole wide world, and that's raised expectations for its first expansion to unreasonable levels. To people from Chester to China, this is the most important thing that'll happen in 2007, apart from the announcement of whatever places, races and enraged monkey-beasts 2008's add-on turns out to include. By that benchmark, what's actually in The Burning Crusade simply can't quite live up to its own hype. After all, it doesn't set out to change the formula, or even particularly to recruit new players. The Burning Crusade exists, first and foremost, to keep us playing WoW. It's there to feed our addiction, and that it certainly does very well.

Nothing has really changed, but there's almost as much game here as there was in the original, all of it sporting an absurd amount of that patented Blizzard polish. It's easy to understand, it's charming, it's beautiful and it contains hundreds of minute achievements that seem to matter only to you, even though every other player is pursuing them with equal personal obsession. Buy TBC and the next year of your life is immediately planned out for you.

At the heart of the new stuff is a raise of the maximum player level from 60 to 70, with tougher enemies and dungeons and better loot and abilities to match. Semi-scientific fixed staring at the XP bar as we kill things suggests that to hit the top will take hardcore players just a couple of weeks, but it'll be a matter of months for a more average hero. Climbing the level ladder is the same as always - complete largely kill-based quests and/or killkillkill whatever you fancy. Some tasks (more, it would seem, than in plain ol' WoW) are more imaginative, but the vast majority disappointingly still involve repeatedly murdering the same type of something. Even at the newly elevated levels, the old frustrations remain. Regularly, you'll need to wait for other players to finish killing enough boars, demons, burrowing armoured worms or mushroom-giants so you can have a play in the death-fields, or find that the beasts you're killing in their dozens steadfastly refuse to drop the pieces of ear your quest-giver has a weird hankering for. Sometimes it's fun, but sometimes it's artificial, repetitive and frustrating. It's the successful bread and butter of Warcraft, and if you didn't like it before you're not going to like it now.

There is a way to avoid some of this grind, though. It's not the big gollygoshwow new feature that WoW players have been salivating over (that's probably the flying Mounts, available for high-level players to cruise new continent Outland's skies with), but it's the most significant change from the old ways. As you may know, WoW contains instanced dungeons, within which you and your chosen party of players are cut-off from the World at large, free to kill and loot whatever you please. The new ones in TBC support less players at once, and are in many cases split into short chunks, meaning it's far easier to find enough people to go adventuring with, and doing so won't take half a day. The dungeon wings are actually much more fun, too - adrenaline pumps the whole brief time, rather than the whole thing becoming a bit of an endurance test a few hours in.

This may be bad news for the uber-groups accustomed to being the select few capable of conquering Warcraft's most demanding dungeons. On the other, more important hand, it's top news for the much larger bunch of players who've lacked the time and online social circle to regularly slay bosses the size of circus tents and claim incredible rewards for it. A one or two-hour dungeon run with a climactic mega-fight is a much more satisfying way of earning experience points than killing vultures in the desert is. To what extent it levels the playing field between more casual players and the guys who play night and day, and the repercussions thereof, remains to be seen.

Good news for everyone is more of what WoW has always done best - exploring weird and wonderful places. It's not the height of technology, but The Burning Crusade is a proper treat for the eyes. TBC's graphical clout may be a hungover midget compared to something like Oblivion's teetotal seven-footer, but the amount of craft that's gone into the art on top of it results in a game that looks shedloads better than almost anything else. Adding a bit of sci-fi to the Tolkienesque mix (Outland is the remains of the near-destroyed home-planet of the Orcs) means the usual fantasy stereotypes of forest, desert, ice and lava can be expanded to include much more inventive stuff. Outland's towering mushroom forests, alien trees and floating sky-islands look better than anything in the original game. Even the two new playable races, Blood Elves for the Horde and Dranei for the Alliance, have starting areas much more interesting than their forerunners ever did - all dancing broomsticks, royal finery and slightly porny boudoirs for the former and towering crystalline technology for the latter.